On a drizzly and drab December morning, Amelia Lorizio of Easton walked up the stairs, across the porch and opened the door to 104 Main St.

Inside, she was greeted by a dazzling display of yarn, hundreds of skeins lining the walls, in every color of the rainbow.

Welcome to Auntie Zaza’s Fiber Works. On Dec. 1, the yarn shop celebrated its first year in business. It’s a quirky and creative enterprise that’s gaining new fans every day.

“I think it’s really great,” said Lorizio who lives in Easton. It was her first outing to Auntie Zaza’s Fiber Works, but it won’t be her last, she said.

“A lot of my friends have been in here and are talking about it. There is nothing else like it in town,” said Lorizio, who was searching for holiday gifts. She was browsing through prepackaged kits stuffed with the ingredients to knit or crochet hats, scarves, socks and more.

“I came when it first opened and I was delighted to see we had a yarn store in the area,” said Patricia Malloy of Stoughton. “I used to drive all the way to Needham to find a yarn shop.”

Auntie Zaza’s averages 10 customers daily. The shop is open every day except for Tuesdays. In a week, as many as 60 people could walk through its doors.

A big part of its clientele are students. Classes are offered every day in knitting, crocheting, felting and even spinning, which is the art of turning raw wool into strands of yarn.

“People walk in and fall in love with the colors of the yarn,” said Elizabeth Alach, 54, the owner of the store. “They say they’ve always wanted to learn to knit and we can help them make something beautiful.”

Alach is also the namesake of the yarn shop because her nieces and nephews call her Auntie Zaza.

Her students range in age from 4 to 84. They travel from as far away as Nashua, N.H., to stock up on the meticulously selected collection of more than 100 yarns.

The majority of her customers come from the South Shore, Alach said, including Easton, Attleboro, Sharon, Milton, Hingham, Rockland, Carver and Braintree.

Alach learned to knit from her mother when she was a child.

“Since I was in my 20s it’s always been in the back of mind that I want to open a yarn shop,” she said. She still works part-time as a nurse in private practice.

But Auntie Zaza’s is her passion, and she is putting in long hours to see her dream survive and thrive.

“I have 23 hours off a week. That’s my weekend,” she laughed. “But I don’t care; I love it so much.”

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Alach isn’t just navigating through the world of retail from her tiny 400-square-foot shop. Even before she opened the store, she launched her presence online with a blog and the website auntiezaza.com. Her online following was so strong, it gave her the push to open a brick-and-mortar store.

Alach said her biggest competition is online. Internet artisan sites like Etsy compete for her clients. So does a warehouse offering discount and discontinued yarns in Northampton called Webs, which is 10 times the size of Auntie Zaza’s.

Small-business failure rates vary depending on where the statistics come from, according to Deluxe Corp, a company that helps small businesses with marketing.

According to Tim Carroll, Deluxe’s vice president of small-business engagement, generally 50 to 70 percent fail within the first 18 months.

“There’s always going to be a way that an entrepreneur can compete against the big-box stores,” said Jon Bryan, a professor who teaches in the college of business at Bridgewater State University.

“The small-business person is never going to be able to have the large volume and low prices so they have to produce a different product, one with a much narrower focus and niche and that will be the place where customers flock because there is a community relationship,” said Bryan.

For Alach, establishing Auntie Zaza’s Fiber Works on Main Street is her chance to help change the face of downtown.

“I wanted to make something nice. It used to look like a ghost town to me, it was so desolate,” she said.

The recent opening of the restaurant The Farmer’s Daughter, just a stone’s throw away from Auntie Zaza’s, gives Alach hope for more businesses to open on Main Street.

“I wanted to be part of that first wave of revitalizing the strip; it’s the center of town,” Alach said.

Jennifer Bray may be reached at jbray@enterprisenews.com or follow her on Twitter @JenniferB_ENT.